Notes on Ancient Greek Sculpture

Ancient Greece made an immediate and lasting impact on Western culture.

Notes on Prehistoric Western Europe Sculpture

The earliest surviving works of Western art correspond roughly to the final stages of the Ice Age in Europe and date back to about 30,000 BC. Before that time, objects were made primarily for utilitarian purposes, although many have esthetic qualities. It is important to remember that the modern western concept of art would have been alien in the Stone Age.

The most famous Paleolithic sculpture is the so-called Venus of Willendorf, carved out limestone and variously dated from 25,000 BC to 21,000 BC. 

The scale of the head, breasts, torso, and thighs in relation to the whole is quite large while the facial features, neck, and lower legs are virtually eliminated.

Notes on Sculpture

Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials, typically stone such as marble, metal, glass, or wood, or plastic materials such as clay, textiles, polymers and softer metals. The term has been extended to works including sound, text and light.

Found objects may be presented as sculptures. Materials may be worked by removal such as carving; or they may be assembled such as by welding , hardened such as by firing, or molded or cast. Surface decoration such as paint may be applied. Sculpture has been described as one of the plastic arts because it can involve the use of materials that can be moulded or modulated.

Notes on Art and Technology

*We will use the batch system. Your exam will be divided into three parts: objective/enumeration, matching,and true or false.

Human experiences of art have been significantly, changed in this postmodern age of the Internet, videos, CDs, advertising, postcards, and posters. But for good or ill?

Notes on Interpreting Art III

*There will be a second set of notes that will be posted tomorrow.

Gender and sexual preference—together with nationality, ethnicity, politics and religion—all seem to have some impact on the meaning of art. Does art bear a message in the way language does?

Notes on What is Art?

Piss Christ by Andres Serrano

Notes on Controversial Art

Kant thinks that our response has to be disinterested—independent of its purpose and the pleasurable sensations it brings about.

Notes on Interpreting Art II

Expression Theory: Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist (1828-1910), advocated this view in his famous essay, “What is Art?”. Tolstoy believed an artist’s chief job is to express and communicate emotions to an audience: 

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so transmit this feeling that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art…”

Notes on Interpreting Art I

Does art bear a message in the way language does? What must we know to clarify an artwork’s meaning? Can’t we just look at an artwork for enjoyment?

Notes on Artemesia Gentileschi

Notes on Genius

In a study of how the notion of genius evolved, Gender and Genius, Christine Battersby argues that ‘genius’ came into its modern use only towards the end of the eighteenth century. In this time period people revised both Renaissance and ancient views of men’s and women’s natures. The late medieval picture of lustful woman was replaced by a view of woman as pure and gentle. Perhaps strangely, the male became more associated with a set of qualities including not just reason but also imagination and passion. Genius was now seen as something ‘primitive’, ‘natural’, and unexplained by reason. As the notion of genius got tied with men, there were peculiar shifts and diagnoses: Rousseau denied that women could be geniuses because they lack the requisite passion, but Kant reversed things by insisting that genius obeys a sort of law or inner duty, and claiming that women lacked such discipline in their emotions.

 Freeland, Cynthia. Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction.Oxford U Press: New York, 2001.

Notes on Gender Issues in Art

*This for my MWF 1:30-2:30 and 5:30-6:30, and TTH 1:30-3:00 and 3:00-4:30 classes.

Is gender relevant to art, to the work an artist makes, or to meaning? What about sexual orientation? It seems some people think it matters—though why, and for what good reasons, remains to be seen.

Notes on Abstract Art

*This is for the 12:00-1:30 TTH graduating students...

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.

Notes on Art Markets

Notes on The Art Museum II

Since about 1965 a shift has occurred in museum finding, 1992, almost $ 700 million was given by corporations to promote culture and the arts. The shift to corporate sources coincides with the rise of the “blockbuster exhibitions”. These exhibitions aim at a broad public appeal and middle-class taste.

In the article written Brian Wallis entitled, Selling Nations: International Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy, he explains, “Individual nations are compelled to dramatize conventionalized versions of their national images, asserting past glories and amplifying stereotypical differences”.

Curator Susan Vogel of the Center for African Art in New York arranged an exhibit in 1988 entitled Art/Artifacts using varied display techniques to provoke visitors to ponder distinctions between art and non-art. 

Freeland, Cynthia. Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction.Oxford U Press: New York, 2001.

Centre Goerges Pompidou

ERRATUM

*Your teacher erroneously attributed the “Spoliarium” to Felix Hidalgo. Juan Luna is the artist responsible for the said artwork.

Spoliarium, in 1884 won the gold medal at the Exposicion Nacional de Bellas Artes, held every three years in Madrid. The painting depicts defeated gladiators being dragged off into an unseen pit of corpses. A Roman scene on the surface, the painting also carries an allegorical message of the sufferings of Luna's fellow countrymen and women.

Notes on Warhol and His Brillo Boxes

“Why was it a work of art when the objects which resemble it exactly, at least under perceptual criteria, are mere things, or, at best, mere artifacts? But even if artifacts, the parallel between them and what Warhol made were exact. Plato could not discriminate between them as he could between pictures of beds and beds. In fact, the Warhol boxes were pretty good pieces of carpentry.”

Andy Warhol was expert at self-promotion. Obsessed with celebrities, Warhol loved jet-setting and partying. Yet he said, ‘I think it would be terrific if everyone was alike’, and coined the cynical slogan that ‘everyone has their fifteen minutes of fame’. Warhol emerged in the ‘Pop Art’ movement of the 1960s, a movement tied into fashion, popular culture, and politics.

Notes on Richard Wagner

Comic adaptation from the second act of Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal, 1882. Written by Patrick C. Mason, illustrated by P. Craig Russell.

Notes on the Garden of Versailles

Andre Le Notrê was from a family of gardeners called upon by Louis XIV to design a garden grand enough to his image as “The Sun King”. Le Notre spent 50 years of his life upon the magnificent gardens of Versailles.